Cabin's Network City

Cabin is building a network city of modern villages. Together, we are growing intergenerational neighborhoods: places where we know our neighbors and raise kids together. Cabin neighborhoods are located in walkable pockets of family-friendly urbanism with nearby parks and nature. Our goal is to create neighborhoods where we'd want to grow up.

We organize our lives around some basic principles we call Obvious Truths:

1. Live Near Friends

2. It Takes a Village

3. Do The Thing

4. Touch Grass

5. Play Infinite Games

This document outlines our core beliefs and plans to build a city:

1. Why we’re building a network city

   1. The problem

   2. A solution

2. What we believe

   1. Live Near Friends

   2. It Takes a Village

   3. Do The Thing

   4. Touch Grass

   5. Play Infinite Games

3. Who we are

   1. Origin story

   2. Community

4. How we’re doing it

   1. Neighborhoods and the network

   2. Culture, economy, and governance

5. Where we’re going

   1. Next 5 Years

   2. Next 5 Decades

   3. Next 5 Centuries

Americans are currently less happy with their lives than they’ve been in 50 years. There seem to be two main causes: increasing isolation and decreasing standard of living.

The US Surgeon has declared an epidemic of isolation and loneliness. This epidemic has roots in the decline of America’s social associations of the 20th century, like the Rotary Club, Boy Scouts, churches, and bowling leagues. The book Bowling Alone shows membership and participation in social and civic organizations swelled in the middle of the twentieth century and then went into steep decline starting in the mid-late 1960s.

This coincides with the rise of the car-centric suburban lifestyle, designed to shuttle single families around to single family homes. Suburban homes have become atomic units disconnected from a deep tapestry of local relationships. The rise of the consumer internet, mobile phones, and social media has exacerbated this sense of loneliness by creating an explosion of screen time, parasocial relationships, and an unrealistic view of others’ lives. Social media promotes anti-social passive engagement; we need in-person connections to build empathy through body language and subtle emotional signals.

Living standards have also been dropping. American life expectancy is at a 25 year low. Meanwhile, the basic costs of living — housing, food, education, and healthcare — have doubled over the same period, accounting for inflation:

While the data is clearest for these problems in America, the same issues are playing out across the globe. Across the world, people are experiencing crises of polarization, social cohesion, loneliness, fertility, government legitimacy, failing infrastructure, cost-of-living, climate change, biodiversity loss, and more.

What can we do to help address these 21st century challenges?

Throughout history, cities have served as fountains of human creativity and prosperity. They are where people come together to build new economies and ways of life. A city is a densely settled set of neighborhoods where people work primarily on non-agricultural tasks. Cities share a culture, economy, and governance structure.

But we haven’t built new cities in a long time. Phoenix, founded in 1868, is the youngest major American city. Established major cities across the world haven't changed much in the past century as development has ground to a halt. In the last 50 years, we’ve built our urban and suburban environment around cars and disconnected single family homes:

We think it’s time to get back to the basics and try something different. It's time to build a new type of city: a network city. Creating a high density of great people has historically required a city to be located in one place, but cities adapt to new technologies. The cities we live in today are designed around cars. We believe cities of the future will be organized online, and will be physically decentralized across a global network.

In the last few decades, humans have gained new tools for city building. Economic, demographic, and social changes are colliding to unlock new ways of living and working. A new tech stack allows online communities to manifest IRL and become more self-sufficient. The resulting cities can help people reconnect with each other and nature, improving both in the process. We believe that the pace layers of civilization are bending in this direction:

When you add this all together, you end up with fertile ground for internet-native cities. There’s a long history of intentional communities rejecting high living costs, gridlocked politics, and urban decay in favor of a greater degree of autonomy, resilience, and local community. In most cases, these communities encounter the harsh reality of living off of the land and fail to proliferate their ideals. Occasionally, they have the tools to persevere and build new societies.

Over the next 50 years, we are building a global network of modern villages for families and friends. They will provide our members with a strong local community, access to nature, and walkable amenities. With these fundamentals, we can create a new old way of living: a lifestyle that resembles the natural environment for humans while staying fully connected to the modern world.

Cabin is organized around five guiding principles, our Obvious Truths:

1. Live Near Friends

2. It Takes a Village

3. Do The Thing

4. Touch Grass

5. Play Infinite Games

Turn your friends into neighbors and your neighbors into friends

We are our best selves when we live near people we admire. Spend any time in a co-located living community and it’s immediately evident how different of a lifestyle it can be for human connection, novelty, and happiness. Living near friends and family is a deeply natural thing for humans to do; it’s how most people who have ever existed have lived. If you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, then you should choose to live around the kind of people that you aspire to be. We choose to surround ourselves with kind, thoughtful, creative, open-minded, playful, generous people. We are highly motivated, easy-going people who want to do good in the world and have fun doing it. We connect, root for, and learn from one another. We build squad wealth when the whole squad is winning. We help each other set and achieve ambitious goals.

It takes a village to raise kids and it takes kids to raise a village

The only way to build a community with resilience and longevity is by designing for intergenerational living. We don’t think everyone needs to have kids, but we do believe the whole village should be a part of raising them. Younger generations can learn from the experiences and wisdom of older adults, while older residents can stay engaged in the changing world. Shared resources and services, such as communal spaces and caregiving, can reduce individual costs and improve the overall stability of a neighborhood. If you want a community to grow and last over time, it needs kids to carry to torch of the culture forward, and to make it their own. Intergenerational neighborhoods can become inclusive, dynamic, supportive communities that can thrive across generations.

Stop talking and start doing

We value actions over abstract ideas. We make, test, build, and create things. We practice docracy: the art of being the change you want to see. We enjoy philosophy, but we value people and processes that make positive tangible changes in their environment. We ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Creation is the feedback loop between ideas and actions. If you really want to understand ideas, you have to try them. Mental models are misleading, and the real world is always more complicated than the version in your head. Great creation happens when you can figure out how to translate big ideas into small practices. This means developing habits of consistent experimentation, starting at small scales — Gall’s law states that complex systems can only work when they evolve from working simple systems.

Get offline and build resiliency with nature

Spending time in nature is crucial for mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. You probably don’t need science to tell you this, but the evidence is there if you want it. The internet is great, but so is unplugging and being present in good old fashioned reality. At Cabin, we believe that the best compounding store of value is a regenerative local community. Small communities can practice regeneration by providing for human needs in close collaboration with the local environment. We can build a globally resilient network of these local communities.

Life is a long-term live action role playing game

At Cabin, we practice co-creation, cooperation, and reciprocity to promote a culture of positive-sum coordination. Co-creating culture naturally happens at small, local scales where people can interact directly and develop trust. It’s also now possible to coordinate and co-create globally using a new type of leviathan that puts capture-resistant governance directly in the hands of a community. We self-govern autonomously and transparently to make organizational decisions without the need for a trusted central authority. We practice “Yes, and” by taking others’ contributions and helping make them better. We do all of this with eye towards the long-term. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Cabin won’t be finished in our lifetimes.

Cabin started with a gathering of online creators called the Creator Coop. As the world reopened in 2021, we met in person at a cabin in the Texas Hill Country. Late one night around a campfire, we dreamed up a residency program for creators governed by a community.

That week, we launched a crowdfund where community members could help sponsor creator residencies at the cabin. An incredible crew of 101 people from across the internet chipped in donations, and over the next few months, we collectively voted on which creators got residencies. From those initial residencies, a DAO was born. Over 750 people are now holders of ₡ABIN, which is used to govern our shared treasury of funds and network of neighborhoods.

Our community of thousands of members spans the globe and grows neighborhoods in our network city. You can find us in Cabin's Census, a directory of our members across the world. A city starts with a high density of incredible humans who can attract more creative, productive, interesting people. Great cities attract ambitious people, and ambitious people create great cities.

Cabin's community includes an incredible range of creators, founders, investors, leaders, and contributors from across the internet. We work with some of the best community-centric strategic partners in the world, and have started the public conversation about network cities.

Neighborhoods are the physical manifestation of Cabin's network city: permanent, intergenerational modern villages to call home. Some Cabin neighborhoods are embedded in existing towns and cities, and others are built from the ground up.

Neighborhoods are places where we build social infrastructure together. They are defined walkable areas where we gather in accordance with our Obvious Truths and practice local collective action. The details will vary based on the specific needs of the community, but they often include:

• Recurring local community events & gatherings

• A chat group that can offer support, connections, and recommendations

• Shared resources like tools, books, and childcare

• Collective action like a community garden, park cleanups, or tactical urbanism

The simplest way to start a neighborhood is to start saying "Hello!" to your neighbors. We know, it sounds almost stupidly simple. It is. But, while building a neighborhood is pretty straightforward, it isn't easy. It can take years to fully blossom into a self-sustaining entity—but the end results can be incredible. We take inspiration from communities that have already been on this journey for years:

If you focus on turning your neighbors into your friends, you can end up with a neighborhood built around an engaged local community, like Shani (Perth, Australia) and Graham (Sacramento, CA) have done:

If you focus more on turning your friends into your neighbors, you could create a neighborhood built around a cohousing compound like Radish (Oakland, CA) or Fractal (Brooklyn, NY):

No matter where you want to end up, all neighborhoods start small and simple—with a dinner party, for instance—and grow into rich tapestries of relationships and value creation. Anyone can join their local neighborhood by creating a profile on cabin.city. Over time, we can grow and change our physical environment to suit the needs of the community. Cabin neighborhoods are places where we can dream about our ideal vision of the future, and start building it right in our own backyards.

Cabin fosters the development of a network of neighborhoods in three primary ways:

1. An accelerator program for neighborhood stewards

2. An online directory of neighborhoods and community members

3. Communication and media shared across the network

Our Neighborhood Accelerator helps people turn their neighbors into friends and friends into neighbors. The accelerator runs 10 week long cohort-based programs where community members become neighborhood stewards. Stewards become mutually supportive and accountable to each other as they learn the art of neighborhood building.

Our online directory, located at cabin.city, connects people who want to live in community with neighborhoods looking for aligned community members to move in. The directory shows people our network of neighborhoods and helps connect them to others who live nearby and want to form local community.

The media on our forum, blog, newsletter, and social media (Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok) keep our network connected and highlight local neighborhoods.

Cities share a culture, economy, and governance structure. Cabin does too:

1. Our culture grows out of the practice of our Obvious Truths.

2. Our village economies encourage reciprocity and regeneration.

3. We govern ourselves with docratic, polycentric, functional sovereignty.

Societies are built together. When we Live Near Friends, Touch Grass, and remember that It Takes a Village, we produce Cabin's culture. Our culture is directly expressed through lived experiences when we gather; it is the acts that bind us together.

We memorialize a shadow of that lived culture through our practices, traditions, memes, and lore. The Greater Cabin Universe includes many lorecraft rabbit holes, like a buried treasure, non-fungible longhorn cattle, one sauna teams, and the ceremonial distribution of hats. We try to embody our Obvious Truths in the way we govern ourselves and build shared local economies.

By living in accordance with these truths, we take seriously the idea that we can collectively grow a life after lifestyle. Matthew Arnold, who coined the modern use of the word culture, imagined intentional cultural development as a way to help people achieve humanistic goals in a secular society. We hope our community can help fulfill that vision.

People tend to think of The Economy as one big hyper-efficient global capital market. But you can create your own local economies that are often much more useful in day-to-day life. You've probably participated in some of these local economies, like Buy Nothing groups or Free Little Libraries.

There's an old saying that goes: “With my family, I’m a communist. With my close friends, I’m a socialist. In the open market, I'm a capitalist." Different economic systems work best at different scales. To build a network city, you need to develop village-scale economics. Village economics are reciprocal and regenerative.

This means we find ways to share resources with our neighbors so that we can build a more resilient living environment together. Instead of looking to the global economy for answers, we focus on what we can build in our own backyards.

Reciprocity economies build human relationships through definancialized exchange. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes reciprocity, or gift economies:

From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the "gift" is deemed to be "free" because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.

While we still rely on money to create economic efficiency, we also try to nurture forms of non-financial contribution that are built on intrinsic motivation. Reciprocity can take many forms: hosting events, lending your neighbor a power tool, bringing something to the potluck, leading a project, contributing to the neighborhood treasury, saying thank you, gifting someone ₡ABIN, and staying to help clean up are all contributions in a gift economy. By finding ways to give our gifts to the community, we create deeper relationships, meaning, and value.

At Cabin, we believe that the best store of value is a regenerative local community. Regenerative economies build long-term capacity and resilience sustainably. They overcome collective action problems to grow common-pool resources for local communities.

Regenerative neighborhoods build local capacity through shared resources and trusted relationships. They create a local abundance of community resources, housing, food, and energy. By growing these systems from the ground up, we can create better homes in less time using fewer resources. By developing more decentralized self-sufficiency, we can build a globally resilient mesh network of sustainable capacity.

Governance is a fancy way of saying: "how we decide how to do things". At Cabin, we believe most decisions should be handled as locally and informally as possible. If you can't figure out how to do the dishes with your housemates, you probably shouldn't worry about bigger governance problems yet. Our political ideology is non-ideological—it's practical. We practice docratic, polycentric, functional sovereignty.

The first step in governance is...just do it. At Cabin, we value actions over abstract ideas. We practice docracy: the art of being the change you want to see. We make, test, build, and create things. We enjoy philosophy, but we value people and processes that make positive tangible changes in the real world.

Docracy (or do-ocracy) is an organizational structure in which individuals choose roles and tasks for themselves and execute them. Responsibilities attach to people who do the work, rather than elected or selected officials. For most local decisions and initiatives, the person who does the work can most effectively make the decision about how to do it. It thrives in a culture of high autonomy and ownership.

Polycentric governance is an emergent system in which diverse centers of partial authority collectively govern a network. In other words: instead of one leader, or no leaders, there are many leaders. Our DAO is legally structured as an Unincorporated Nonprofit Association (like a neighborhood association). We collectively manage our treasury, neighborhoods, and membership via programmable polycentric governance:

• Neighborhoods are the core units of our city; places that live in accordance with our Obvious Truths. Each neighborhood operates autonomously, with the guidance of a Neighborhood Steward. Neighborhood Stewards are the founders of Cabin neighborhoods—they lead the charge in building local community. The City Directory determines which neighborhoods are inside of our city limits.

• ₡ABIN is our governance token, representing voting power in network-wide decisions. Anyone who holds or has been delegated 1000 ₡ can submit a governance proposal to the DAO. Token holders govern the DAO’s public treasury to grow its network of neighborhoods. Proposals are selected using quadratic voting to increase equity among token holders.

• Contributors are people working on behalf of the DAO to build the network city. Each approved contributor pod executes its limited mission autonomously. New contributor pods are proposed and discussed on our forum.

Functional sovereignty is the direct practice of voluntary collective action. Functional sovereignty starts at the smallest scales of human coordination and applies best to the practical reality of people’s day-to-day lives. The most relevant form of sovereignty for most people is their ability to exercise self-governance over their immediate surroundings with their nearest neighbors. 

The simplest acts of functional local sovereignty in urban areas involve practicing microsolidarity with your existing neighbors. Examples of local voluntary collective action include the creation of community events, emergency preparedness caches, lending libraries, and other shared resources. Neighborhood groups can also make rogue improvements to urban public goods infrastructure through tactical urbanism, like the creation of unsanctioned community gardens, park benches, or bike lanes. More advanced forms of functional collective action include developing third spaces, cohousing compounds, micro-schools, and solarpunk villages. 

Onchain governance and resource management provides globally verifiable transparency, programmability, and capture resistance. Full financial transparency provides an organization with a level playing field and makes fraud easy to detect. When an organization's money is transparent, everyone can see where money is going and anyone can make suggestions on how to allocate it. Onchain governance is easy to program, allowing novel voting structures. Cabin uses quadratic voting to make governance more equitable. The City Directory is governed as a simple token curated registry (TCR).

This self-governance is enabled by a new type of leviathan that puts capture-resistant governance directly in the hands of a community. Cabin members can self-custody tokens that represent roles, responsibilities, and governance powers that can be used without the need for a trusted central authority. This allows us to self-govern autonomously and transparently to make organizational decisions without the need for a trusted central authority.

In the next five years, we will grow the first 500 neighborhoods living in accordance with our Obvious Truths. The Census and City Directory will serve as a community sense-making and coordination layer, allowing Citizens to find like-minded community members, build reputation, and assemble resources. Building new neighborhoods is a huge undertaking. By creating deep relationships across members of the community, we will form groups that have the skills, relationships, and resources to build permanent places we can call home.

In the next 50 years, we plan to grow a network city of over 1,000,000 people concurrently living in permanent intergenerational communities. Our citizens will live across a global network of neighborhoods deeply embedded in their local environment.

Neighborhoods will range in size from a handful of people living near each other to thousands of people in large settlements that are dense, walkable, human-scaled, and regenerative. Some of these neighborhoods will be in existing towns and neighborhoods that fit our criteria, where we will co-locate within walking distance of each other. Others will be built from the ground up to suit the needs of our community.

Societies across history have formed via decentralized autonomous networks of cooperating bands of humans. These local bands, tribes, villages, and towns have developed interdependent networks of cultural and economic exchange that allowed them to thrive.

Occasionally, a tenacious group of people uses an emerging set of technologies to build an enduring new system of living. The societies that emerge during these historical periods have become fountains of human culture, creativity, economic activity, and self-sovereign governance.

We are living through one of these periods, and we take that seriously enough to consider 500 year plans. But it would be ludicrous to use central planning exercises on these time horizons. The best we can do is learn from history and prepare for possibilities.

We study historical examples of societies that have created enduring systems of self-governance. Across the history of Western civilization, there’s a clear cycle of decentralized cities and centralized states. Mesopotamian river valley civilizations, Greek city-states, medieval market towns, and New England townships show us how local neighborhoods can grow into federated networks that create conditions of peace and prosperity:

Groups of people throughout history (and often ignored by it) have built societies and cities around an incredible diversity of governance structures and social contracts. We draw inspiration from many of these sources, including Catalhoyuk, Nebelivka, Uruk, Teotihuacan, and the Haudenosaunee. Our network of neighborhoods is designed to have the same type of decentralized autonomous local control, coupled with economic and cultural exchange, that has led to successful city building in the past.

Five hundred years ago, the largest cities had hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. Now, the largest cities are 100x bigger and most humans live in urban areas. If we are successful in building a network city of a million people over the next 50 years, over the next 500 we will likely see billions of people become citizens of network cities. We hope that this way of organizing ourselves can increase peace and prosperity in the same way it has when cities have emerged in the past.